Thursday, 8 September 2016

Moto takes a jab at Samsung’s Note 7 recall. Hypocritical, much?

It took them long enough, but the marketing
heads at Motorola have finally realized that there’s some self-promotion
potential in Samsung’s massive, and embarrassing, Note 7 recall.

The Lenovo-owned company is running a new promo where it gives a free Incipio offGRID
Power Pack with every Moto Z Droid purchase. So far, nothing special, but Moto
couldn’t resist slipping in a passive-aggressive jab at Samsung:

“At Moto,
our priority is safety first. Unlike some manufacturers, we adhere to the
highest standards in quality and testing of all our batteries.”

Ouch, what a, uhm, burn!

There’s a problem though. Samsung is
putting safety first.

While some criticized Samsung for the way it
conducted the recall, it’s important to realize that the Note 7 was recalled
voluntarily. Assuming that the stats about the magnitude of the problem are
correct (1 in 42,000 units), Samsung could have tried to sweep the problem
under the rug, or at least wait for a better time to come clean.

Instead, Samsung chose to recall millions of
Note 7 units, at a cost that is estimated to reach more than a billion dollars.
For reference, that’s Motorola’s entire revenue in the first quarter of
2016. Furthermore, the recall was announced during the hugely important fall
season, just days before LG and Apple announced their Note 7 competitors – the V20
and the iPhone 7 Plus.

Even if you believe that Motorola is in its
own rights to call out Samsung, this little stunt comes off as hypocritical.
After all, a cursory Google search reveals headlines like:

The sad, unavoidable reality is phones and
other electronics sometimes catch fire or explode, and there’s little we can do
about it. It happens regularly, with devices from Samsung, Apple, Sony, LG,
and, yes, Lenovo and Motorola.

That’s why Motorola’s attack seems very
misguided, at best.

It’s not the first time Moto takes on Samsung
on shaky grounds. Just a few weeks ago, Moto took to social media to call out
Samsung for “stealing” the Always On Display feature. But Motorola forgot to mention that Nokia used the same feature
(which is hardly innovative in any case) on its Lumia Windows phones, months
before the Moto X came out with it.